Prayer · Daily
The Hail Mary: the Prayer in Full, Line by Line
The Ave Maria in the traditional Catholic words, where each line comes from, and how to pray it
The Hail Mary is the Catholic prayer that greets Mary in the angel’s words, blesses her Son Jesus, and asks her to pray for us.
Hail Mary, full of grace,
the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou amongst women,
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
pray for us sinners,
now and at the hour of our death.
Amen.
Its first half is the Gospel (Luke 1:28 and 1:42); the second half, from “Holy Mary, Mother of God”, was added by the Church in the 1400s and 1500s.
Go deeper
Is the Hail Mary in the Bible? The prayer line by line
3 min read
The first half is. The prayer has two halves: the first is two greetings from the first chapter of St. Luke’s Gospel, and the second is a request the Church added. The Catechism calls the whole prayer “a privileged expression” of how Christians pray to Mary (CCC 2676), and reads it phrase by phrase. This page does the same.
“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.” These are the angel Gabriel’s words to a young woman in Nazareth, at the Annunciation. In the Douay-Rheims, the classic Catholic English Bible, the angel says: “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women” (Luke 1:28). The Gospel does not say her name at this point; the prayer adds it. “Hail” translates a Greek word that also means “rejoice”, and the Catechism gives both: “Hail Mary [or Rejoice, Mary]” (CCC 2676). It also explains why the two phrases belong together: “Mary is full of grace because the Lord is with her” (CCC 2676).
“Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.” These words belong to Mary’s cousin Elizabeth. When Mary comes to visit her, Elizabeth is “filled with the Holy Ghost” (Luke 1:41) and cries out: “Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb” (Luke 1:42, Douay-Rheims). The Catechism says that here “we make Elizabeth’s greeting our own” (CCC 2676).
“Jesus.” Neither greeting names the child, but the angel had: “thou shalt call his name Jesus” (Luke 1:31). The Catechism points to it as the center of the whole prayer: the Hail Mary “reaches its high point” in “blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus” (CCC 435).
“Holy Mary, Mother of God.” Here the second half begins, and it starts the way Elizabeth went on: “And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” (Luke 1:43). The Council of Ephesus in 431 solemnly proclaimed her Mother of God, because the child she bore is God the Son. The Catechism puts it simply: “Because she gives us Jesus, her son, Mary is Mother of God and our mother” (CCC 2677).
“Pray for us sinners.” We ask her to pray, and in asking, “we acknowledge ourselves to be poor sinners” and turn to the “Mother of Mercy” (CCC 2677).
“Now and at the hour of our death.” The two moments that matter most: this one, and the last one. The Catechism’s hope is that Mary will be with us as she stood by the Cross when her Son died (CCC 2677; John 19:25–27), where Jesus gave her to the disciple he loved: “Behold thy mother” (John 19:27). We ask her to welcome us then, “to lead us to her son, Jesus, in paradise” (CCC 2677).
“Amen.” “So be it.”
Who wrote the Hail Mary? How the Church added “Holy Mary, Mother of God”
3 min read
No single person wrote it. The first half is Scripture: the angel’s greeting and Elizabeth’s. The second half grew in the Church’s prayer over several centuries, and was fixed in the form Catholics say today in 1568.
The greeting, about 1050–1200. The Gospel greetings were sung in the liturgy long before that, but the Catholic Encyclopedia (1910) finds “little or no trace” of the Hail Mary as a set prayer for the faithful before about 1050. By about 1196, Eudes de Sully, bishop of Paris, told his priests to make sure their people knew it, along with the Creed and the Our Father. At that time it ended at “the fruit of thy womb”.
The name of Jesus, the later Middle Ages. The word “Jesus” was added once the greetings had become a prayer, and by the 1400s it was usual. Tradition gives the credit to Pope Urban IV (1261–1264), but the Encyclopedia says the evidence is not clear enough to be sure.
The petition, the 1400s and 1500s. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, people ended the prayer with petitions of their own, and several forms were in use. A French shepherds’ calendar printed in 1493 adds a third part, which its English translation gives as “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners”. A little work of Savonarola’s, printed in 1495, opens with the Ave Maria in today’s words, missing only one (“nostrae”, “our”). Around 1514 the full form appears in the breviaries of the Camaldolese monks and of the Mercedarian friars. The Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566) explains that the Church itself added this petition to the Gospel greeting.
The Roman Breviary, 1568. Pope St. Pius V’s Roman Breviary of 1568, the Church’s book for the daily prayer of the Hours, finally made the whole prayer official, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.” Before then, the Hail Mary in the liturgy had ended with “Jesus. Amen.” Since 1568 the Latin words have not changed.
So the honest answer to “Who wrote the Hail Mary?” is: the angel Gabriel and St. Elizabeth, as St. Luke records them, and the whole Church, praying it for five hundred years before it settled into one form. The English “thee” and “thou” are those of the older Catholic prayer books; the Baltimore Catechism of 1885 already prints it with the same words, including “amongst women”, as it is prayed here.
The Hail Mary in Latin (Ave Maria)
1 min readThis is the Latin as the Holy See prints it in the appendix of common prayers to the Compendium of the Catechism, with accents that mark the stressed syllable.
This is the Latin as the Holy See prints it in the appendix of common prayers to the Compendium of the Catechism, with accents that mark the stressed syllable. “Ave Maria” is simply its first two words.
Ave, María, grátia plena,
Dóminus tecum.
Benedícta tu in muliéribus,
et benedíctus fructus ventris tui, Iesus.
Sancta María, Mater Dei,
ora pro nobis peccatóribus,
nunc et in hora mortis nostræ.
Amen.
“Nostræ” is often printed “nostrae”, and “Iesus” “Jesus”; they are the same words. Two famous songs are called “Ave Maria”. Gounod’s, written over a prelude by Bach, sets these Latin words. Schubert’s began in 1825 as a German song on a translation of a poem by Walter Scott, and the Latin prayer was fitted to the melody later. In Spanish the prayer is Dios te salve, María; in Portuguese, Ave-Maria, cheia de graça.
The Hail Mary in the Rosary and the Angelus
2 min readA decade of the Rosary is one Our Father, ten Hail Marys and the Glory Be, while you think about one scene from the life of Jesus and Mary.
The Rosary. A decade of the Rosary is one Our Father, ten Hail Marys and the Glory Be, while you think about one scene from the life of Jesus and Mary. A five-decade Rosary has 53 Hail Marys: three at the start, after the Creed and the first Our Father, and fifty in the decades. In many parishes the Fatima Prayer follows each decade, and the Rosary ends with the Hail, Holy Queen. AngelGuard’s guide to how to pray the Rosary walks through every step, bead by bead, with the same words as this page.
The Catechism says the Rosary grew up in the medieval West “as a popular substitute for the Liturgy of the Hours” (CCC 2678): a way for people without books to pray every day, with beads to count. The Church calls it “an epitome of the whole Gospel” (CCC 971).
The Angelus. At six in the morning, at noon and at six in the evening, many Catholics stop for the Angelus. It recalls the Annunciation in three short verses, each followed by a Hail Mary, and ends with a prayer. The Angelus and the Hail Mary tell the same story: the angel’s message, Mary’s yes, and the Word made flesh. The full prayer is on the Angelus; in the Easter season the Regina Caeli takes its place.
From 1884 until the liturgical reform of the 1960s, three Hail Marys were also said after every Low Mass, by order of Pope Leo XIII.
How to pray the Hail Mary
2 min readThe Hail Mary is short enough to say without thinking, and that is its risk.
Slowly, once. The Hail Mary is short enough to say without thinking, and that is its risk. Say it once, slowly, as if it were new. Stop after “the Lord is with thee” and after “Jesus”. Those are the two places where the prayer turns from Mary to her Son.
A decade. When you have five minutes, pray one decade: an Our Father, ten Hail Marys and a Glory Be. Choose one scene from the Gospel before you start, such as the Annunciation, and keep it in mind while the words go on. Jesus warned against praying like those who “think that in their much speaking they may be heard” (Matthew 6:7). Ten Hail Marys said with your mind on Christ are not that: they are the same words of love said again, not a formula to wear down heaven.
A prayer for the moment before you begin, to the Father who sent the angel:
Father, you sent your angel to Mary,
and she said yes to your Word.
As I greet her with the angel’s words,
turn my heart to her Son, Jesus,
and keep me close to him,
now and at the hour of my death.
Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Three Hail Marys, morning and night. An old private devotion is to say three Hail Marys when you wake up and before you sleep. It is traditionally linked to St. Mechtilde of Hackeborn, a thirteenth-century Benedictine nun, as three Hail Marys in honor of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit for what each gave her. St. Alphonsus Liguori recommended saying them morning and night, adding after each a short prayer to Mary for purity of body and soul. The three also ask her to be with us at the hour of our death, the hour every Hail Mary names. It is a small, faithful habit that opens and closes each day with her Son’s name. No number of prayers buys a result, and leaflets that promise one go beyond what the Church teaches. What the Church does say is that we can “entrust all our cares and petitions” to Mary, because “she prays for us” (CCC 2677).
When you need Mary’s help most of all, the Memorare is the classic prayer of trust, and our page on Mary gathers her feasts, titles and prayers.
Why do Catholics pray the Hail Mary? Because Mary leads to Christ
2 min readThe most common question about the Hail Mary is whether it puts Mary in Christ’s place.
The most common question about the Hail Mary is whether it puts Mary in Christ’s place. The Catechism answers in one line: “Jesus, the only mediator, is the way of our prayer” (CCC 2674). Mary does not stand between us and her Son; the Catechism says she is “wholly transparent to him” (CCC 2674). In the traditional icons of East and West she is the one who “shows the way” (CCC 2674), her hand turned toward her Son.
The Catechism sees two movements in every prayer to Mary (CCC 2675). The first praises God for what he did in her, as she did in the Magnificat: “all generations shall call me blessed” (Luke 1:48). The second asks her to pray for us. The Hail Mary has both, in that order: the greeting praises God’s work, and “Holy Mary” asks for her prayer.
Honoring Mary is not worship. The Church teaches that devotion to her “differs essentially from the adoration” given to God alone (CCC 971). Asking her to pray for us is like asking a friend to pray for you, except that this friend is the mother of the Lord. At Cana she told the servants: “Whatsoever he shall say to you, do ye” (John 2:5). She still says it to everyone who prays the Hail Mary: each one brings us to her, and she sends us on to him.
The prayer’s center is not Mary’s name but her Son’s. Its first half ends with “Jesus” (CCC 435), and its last words ask her to be with us at our death, to lead us to him (CCC 2677).
Questions
What is the Hail Mary prayer?
The Hail Mary is the Catholic prayer that greets the Virgin Mary with the angel’s words and asks her to pray for us. Its words: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”
Who wrote the Hail Mary?
No single person. The first half is from the Gospel of Luke: the angel Gabriel’s greeting (Luke 1:28) and Elizabeth’s (Luke 1:42). The name “Jesus” was added in the Middle Ages, traditionally credited to Pope Urban IV in the 1260s. The second half, “Holy Mary, Mother of God…”, grew in the 1400s and was fixed by the Church in the Roman Breviary of 1568.
Is the Hail Mary in the Bible?
Yes, the first half is. “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women” is the angel’s greeting in Luke 1:28, and “blessed is the fruit of thy womb” is Elizabeth’s in Luke 1:42. The second half is a petition the Church added, echoing Elizabeth’s “the mother of my Lord” (Luke 1:43).
Why do Catholics pray the Hail Mary?
To praise God for what he did in Mary, and to ask her to pray for us, the way you would ask a friend. The Catechism is clear that Jesus is “the only mediator” (CCC 2674) and that devotion to Mary differs essentially from the adoration given to God (CCC 971). The prayer’s center is the name of Jesus (CCC 435).
How many Hail Marys are in a rosary?
53 in a five-decade Rosary: three at the beginning and ten in each of the five decades. Praying all four sets of mysteries (Joyful, Luminous, Sorrowful and Glorious) means 200 in the decades.
What is the Hail Mary in Latin?
“Ave, María, grátia plena, Dóminus tecum. Benedícta tu in muliéribus, et benedíctus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta María, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatóribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostræ. Amen.” This is the text the Holy See prints in the Compendium of the Catechism.
What are the three Hail Marys?
An old private devotion: three Hail Marys said every morning and every night. It is traditionally linked to St. Mechtilde of Hackeborn (13th century) and was recommended by St. Alphonsus Liguori. Tradition says the three honor the Holy Trinity and ask Mary to be with us at the hour of death. It is a loving daily habit, not a formula with a guaranteed result.
What does “full of grace” mean?
That God’s grace fills Mary completely. The Catechism explains: “Mary is full of grace because the Lord is with her” (CCC 2676). The grace in her is the presence of God himself, who has come to live in her.
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